News & Views

Cannes Lions / The House That Bravery Built Recap

Last week, the Contagious team descended upon Cannes Lions with one mission: champion the bravest creativity in marketing. We brought some of our favorite industry thinkers and doers together to celebrate and interrogate both awarded and overlooked work and trends of the year at a villa dubbed The House That Bravery Built.

It was a whirlwind of inspiring conversations and great celebrations. We hosted the Contagious Pioneer agencies with our friends at Snapchat, felt the vibrations of a rowdy crowd of football fans for a Euro 2016 party with Wearable Experiments, kicked off a forward-thinking group disrupting the NGO model with Afrika Tikkun, learned the latest insights around young people with McCann Worldgroup's Truth Central and much, much more.

Contagious also invited a select group of creators, brands and agencies to help bring the house to life with an interactive exhibition, representing brave work featured on the Contagious I/O platform, exciting new technologies and provocative ideas. Take a look at the displays on show below:

Wearable Experiments debuted their new Football Fan Shirts at Cannes Lions 2016, and the House That Bravery Built den contained a week-long installation of the haptic jerseys that respond to live gameplay. 50 guests of Contagious and Wearable Experiments took the jerseys for a spin during the Monday night Euro match between England and Slovakia. Founder Billie Whitehousewas recently interviewed in Contagious Magazine's Q1 issue and spoke about her vision for the wearables future at Now Next Why in New York.

Nexus Productions brought along their piñata VR experience for the HTC Vive. The headset and hand controller combo allowed visitors to smash a virtual piñata with everything from a balloon sword to a chainsaw. The only product flaw? There's no way to eat real sweets in the virtual world. There's a lot of potential (and many more advances to come) for the See our VR trend coverage on Contagious I/O and in the pages of the Most Contagious Report.

Grey London came bearing a pet bed and toy mice, but there was more than met the eye: thanks to the magic of their McVitie's iKitten app, an adorable kitten appeared in the house, dressed to the nines and with tricks aplenty.

‘We wanted to continue to modernise the brand in the eyes of the nation, particularly amongst younger adults,’ Grey London planner Daniel Sherrard told Contagious I/O in February. ‘Since the traditional tea break is increasingly giving way to the phone break, we wanted to inject the feeling of McVitie’s biscuits into that.’

Electric Objects is working to make digital art more accessible with their app-controlled EO1 screen, on which we welcomed guests into the space with everything from calming landscape photography to a dancing Drake GIF. The art world is leading the way with impressive creative campaigns to keep the public engaged with its institutions, as we explored in the Contagious Talk 'Think Like a Museum'.

As Contagious wrote on I/O in March, ‘There are a whole host of intelligent toys on the market, but this device stands out by making unconnected snuggle-buddies smart. This allows for more flexibility, as it’s impossible for parents to control which toys a child will get most attached to.'